Rodion

The harpsichord had long been out of vogue by the time Victoria ascended to the throne in the 1830s. Mozart and Haydn wrote for it early in their careers but by the late 18th century the harpsichord (and clavichord) had been abandoned for the piano because of the pianoforte's dynamic range (piano-forte means soft-loud). Harpsichords basically only have one volume, and it's not very loud. Crows' quills can only pluck so hard.

That doesn't detract at all from the feeling of the instrument -- I love the sound -- but it all but disappeared from the 1790s until the 20th century when composers like Poulenc, de Falla, Martinu and Gorecki wrote for the harpsichord again.

I ran the Verify and there were no problems with the installation.

I'm experiencing crashes in both trials on a regular basis. If I don't quit and restart the game after every trial, I almost invariably experience a crash on the second trial. The type of crash varies: I have experienced all of the following:

• A crash with a dialog that asks me to describe what I was doing which sends the report to NCsoft.
• A crash that sends a report to Microsoft.
• A sound loop crash.
• A crash that has a dialog that tells me that it's about to crash and asks whether I want to continue or exit.
• A dialog that tells me there is a corrupt .pigg file (not always the same one).
• (Rarely) Windows tells me a bad instruction was executed.
• The game exits straight out to Windows without any warning at all.

I have updated my drivers. I have an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 SE (driver version 270.61, and the nVidia site tells me it's at the most recent version).

I notice (with Task Manager) that the memory footprint of the game increases over time, and I also notice that right before the crash the game begins to slow down, as if thrashing.

These things and the wide variety of crashes make me believe that the game client is running out of memory. The .pigg files are probably being reported falsely as corrupt because the game is running out of memory reading them in.

These are all indications of a memory leak, perhaps in one of the powers that's used over and over in the trials by one of the Praetorian clockwork.

I haven't really experienced crashes in other content, including regular TFs and missions. It's certainly possible that the leak is always there, but is especially bad during trials because the large numbers of players and power invocations.

However, the crashes seem to happen more often in Lambda than in BAF. I've been involved with several attempts for the Master of Lambda, which makes it take much longer than normal. Most of those attempts have ended in crashes.

If Shade's numbers are right, then it's not just "random chance." Assuming that the chance of a rare or very rare is in the vicinity of 5% or less (as it is with rare invention salvage), the odds of getting 43 out of 47 drops with a simple random roll are so vanishingly small as to be essentially impossible. How vanishingly small? Well, something like 1 chance in the number of electrons in the universe.

If, however, the chance of getting a rare/very rare is in the vicinity of 20-30%, then it's not so weird, and it's easy to see how marginal increases in team performance could boost the rewards. The question then becomes, what rewards did other players on the team get? If they're just getting the kind of rolls his stalker was getting, it Shade's suspicion that something is not a simple random number is justified.

Either the chance of getting a rare/very rare is fairly high, or the contribution of team/individual performance can significantly boost the selection of your reward table.

It depends on the probabilities involved and the confidence level desired. While I agree that 22 is too small, 500 to 1000 is probably enough to get a decent sense if the probability of a very rare drop is in the ball park of 1-2%. If a very rare is only 0.1%, then obviously you need a much higher sample size.

From my experience, playing exclusively squishies (two controllers, a corruptor, a defender and a blaster, enough to get two of them four T3 incarnate powers), the drops seem random. I've been on teams where the lead tank gets a common and I get a rare on an Ill/Emp controller.

The drop table seems to be either weighted most heavily to drop uncommons, or to include performance in the calculation for the drop if commons are the most likely. That's from my anecdotal observation that I've got far more uncommons than anything else.

When you're in the game and you have the Incarnate window open to an alpha slot, clicking one of the icons for a buff shows all the possible ways to craft it on the right. There used to be only one for the first three tiers (using shards), but now there are two: one that uses shards and one that uses threads.

The documentation on the CoH websites isn't updated as religiously as the information on paragonwiki.com. Unfortunately, the best place to get this information is in the game itself, and there's not a lot of explanatory material to help you make sense of it.

I'm also disappointed at the profusion of currencies, but there are legitimate reasons for their introduction. I just wish the devs could accomplish the same goals without forcing people to participate in exactly the same content over and over and over.

It wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't crash every other time I ran a trial, or the server lag during the prisoner escape on full leagues wasn't so awful.

It is presumptuous to pretend it is simple to muck with a database like this. Quick, easy fixes are usually the ones that cause the most damage when they go wrong.

Technically speaking, a softcapped EA is weaker against defense debuffs than SR, not Smash/Lethal (if both are softcapped to the same level). But since many Lethal attacks also have defense debuffs, it can be hard to distinguish the two.

It's relatively easy (by doing tip missions and spending alignment merits) to get enough Kinetic Combat and other IOs to softcap your /EA brute by level 40-something and make it pretty robust. I did the Ice Mistral TF at level 48 and withstood the huge behemoth ambushes at the end (I was the last one standing when I took down the AV). This was with only the standard powers (including Tough and Weave), and without using Overload.

If you're cognizant of what has defense debuffs and monitor your current defense, you can avoid defense cascade failures by taking purples at the appropriate time.

The question is whether the plusses of EA (Energy Drain, with its sapping and minor healing, and Energy Cloak, with its very nice stealth) are sufficient to warrant taking it.

I've gotten two rings of sequester with my dominator, at least twice. Each time we were attempting Strong & Pretty, and had pulled the AVs to the helipad where we could debuff, control and demolish the spawns with the appropriate timing. In this case, you really do need to use the debuffs and controls, because the spawns can quickly overwhelm your team if you don't.

Every time I've gotten the rings, it's because there were no tanks and no brutes on the AV. One time Nightstar was just running around randomly hitting squishies.

The magnitude of tanker and brute taunts from Gauntlet is higher than the aggro generated by controls and debuffs. If the melee characters are doing their jobs, you should be able to do your job, which is control and debuff. And, while it's true that debuffs are heavily resisted by AVs, debuffs from 10 or 12 debuffers do make a difference, especially when support spawns are attacking.

A blanket statement of "don't use debuffs and controls" is wrong. The right thing to say is, "If you get one ring, stop spamming AoE powers, and attack other targets one at a time. When you lose the ring, go back to business as usual."

That's part of the problem: many raid leaders insist on running with 16 or 24 players, and that means it can take half an hour to put it together depending on time of day, server population, how many other concurrent trials there are, etc.

Even though the devs have redacted the worst lag in the BAF, it's still pretty awful during the prisoner escape phase. You waste a lot of time trying to activate powers that look like they've recharged, but the server doesn't think so. If you're playing a controller, for example, your area hold would seem to be quite useful for stopping escaping minions, except that it won't fire when you need it to -- the prisoners all run right past you and then your hold goes off long after they're gone.

If the servers can't handle the load, the maximum league size should be reduced.

This is likely due to an increased supply due to people doing the WST, which currently has level 30 or so Council foes, which drop both arcane and tech mid-tier salvage.

When everyone is running trials the supply of salvage and recipes in general goes waaaay down. If I spend 30-60 minutes on an ITF my salvage and recipe inventories fill up very quickly, sometimes twice during the TF.

But when I spend 30-60 minutes running a trial, half that time is spent waiting for it to start and on a Lambda much of the other half is spent running around blowing up crates, which drop very little salvage. Even on a BAF the amount of salvage that drops seems to be minimal.

When people complain about the high cost of mid-level salvage, they have to ask themselves what they are doing to increase the supply of the items they want. If they're not running level 25-35 missions (or rolling random salvage at that level with AE tickets), they're part of the problem: they're consuming an item but contributing nothing to supply.

Common salvage almost literally falls like rain. If you really can't stand paying 50K for an item, go run a few missions that drop that salvage (through Ouroboros if need be) and store 3-4 of each common item in the bank and your market slots.

When I level characters I buy and craft recipes as I level up. I save high-demand salvage so I have most of what I need when I need it. If you wait until you're level 50 and then try to buy all your recipes and salvage all at once, you're to blame for your own predicament. Of course it's hard to buy dozens of recipes and hundreds of pieces of salvage if you're trying to do it all at once.

It's not the market's fault that other players aren't out there farming the salvage that you want, and selling it for peanuts. If you don't want to pay high prices, just generate the salvage yourself.

These days, with rare recipes easily obtained with alignment merits, and salvage easily bought with tickets from AE, the only things that can actually be hard to get on demand are uncommon recipes. I've resorted to using reward merits through the vendors for some of the high-demand uncommons (ones that cost more than 20 million). But the supply of some mid-level uncommons is just not there, and generating them with AE tickets is too hit and miss, and using reward merits for large numbers of uncommon recipes is not feasible.

One thing that would help would be if you could use alignment merits to buy a full set of uncommon recipes at a specific level.

"Lag" is not a very useful term to use because it doesn't describe what's happening.

You can have poor performance due to a low-end graphics card, insufficient RAM, slow Internet connections, too many players in the same instance/zone causing the server to bog down. Rubberbanding can be caused by packet loss, which usually means a bad connection. Spotty Internet connections can be caused by weather, construction, even sunspots.

Because the Internet is a large and extremely interconnected system, your connection may be fine, and the server's connection may be fine, but the route used to connect you to the server may become slow and spotty. These routes can be recalculated when they become unreliable, but because everything is dynamic it makes things hard to reproduce and track down.

If you're encountering graphics lag in Praetoria it's probably due to a low-end graphics card. In this case, try turning off the high-end graphics functions and reducing your particle count. Or get a better graphics card. You may also need to increase your system RAM.

Certain powers can really drag your graphics performance down. I couldn't stand playing my Dark/Dark scrapper because the graphics lag was so terrible. Eventually I found a way to increase the distance for suppressing personal graphics effects to 300 feet (thanks, Castle, wherever you may be) but now that I've bought a new graphics card it's not an issue anymore.

A less radical solution is to have threads drop from any level 50+ enemies, not just in the trials.

I wouldn't be surprised if that eventually happens, in much the same way that shards now drop from any level enemies, and not just level 50s.

The devs are intentionally gating many people through the same content: the weekly strike targets and the trials are the most recent examples of this. This is partly to encourage large teams and to make finding TF/SF teams easier to find.

The devs are demonstrably pro-farming: they are offering a reward (badges) for players to repeat the weekly strike target 2, 10 or 50 times. The defeat badges -- especially the ones that require hundreds or thousands of defeats -- are also obviously farming oriented. Places like Point Foxtrot in FBZ were provided for us to farm Fakes. Defeat missions were provided to give us a little extra incentive to farm spawns. And the ONLY way to get the incarnate powers in less than a few years is to farm the trials over and over.

The devs are not against repeating content again and again for rewards. They are opposed to players who exploit quirks of the game to gain rewards faster than the devs intend.

Because we play for many more hours than there is content, the devs obviously intend us to replay the same thing over and over. But they do all they can to encourage us to vary what we play because they know we'll burn out if we repeat the same thing too much.

Because the mechanics of the trial and the LFG queue are new, and defined to work this way. Trials are defined to be for multiple teams. The intent is for people to build teams in any location they like -- not just Pocket D or RWZ -- and then queue for the trial. The system takes the various teams and creates a league from them. Solo players are just the degenerate case of one-person teams. But the downside of this system is that there's not enough information to make pickup leagues reliable.

Most people are treating leagues like giant teams and feel the need to pick every single person in the entire league (see below for why). It seems most people don't even realize that that the leader of each team in a league can still invite additional players. If they did so, the whole process of building the league would proceed faster, instead of making the leader invite every single player. Actual play during the trials breaks down along team lines as well -- each team is generally assigned one task for each segment of the trial.

Most "private" trials aren't really private, because few league leaders are actually drawing members from SGs/acquaintances only. Most of the time they have to solicit at least a few members from the general population.

Now, I'll certainly be the first to acknowledge that pickup leagues have the potential for disaster. But if people instead built balanced standalone teams and then queued, this wouldn't be an issue.

The problem, of course, is that we don't know how many players/teams are in the LFG queue. So there's no way to tell how long the wait will be. So league leaders -- almost of necessity -- build the whole league to make sure they can actually start.

We thus have the worst combination: old fashioned mechanisms to build teams, and a new system that could potentially build a non-viable league out of random individuals and teams.

To fix this we should be able to register a team for a trial without queuing for it. The names and ATs of players registered (or queued) for a trial should be visible. That would give people the option to talk to other like-minded individuals to form a league, if desired, or they could just queue their teams for the trial.

Then, when the system decides to start up the trial (when the minimum number of players are queued) it should display a window with all the candidate players for the trial. Participants could see who all is there, and judge whether the league is viable. When you click Accept you would be displayed as such in the window. This would also resolve the issue of "which moron didn't click the button to enter the trial?" You could see who accepted as they did so.

With this system there'd be no surprises when everyone zoned into the trial. You will have agreed to the league composition ahead of time and not just dumped into the trial with some totally random group.

There seem to be at least three or four different sounds depending on your attack set. When my BS/Shield scrapper uses Confront she makes a horrible honking sound and then bangs on the shield when the shield is out, but when no shield powers are active she makes a more acceptable "Ah!" sound.

Do Shield/BS tankers do the same thing with Taunt?

I did two Lambdas and a BAF tonight on an Ill/Emp and got two rares and 3 uncommons on the night. Marauder went down amazingly fast; not sure what was doing such heavy damage against him.

All I'm doing is what you should do: hit every group I can with Spectral Terror, buff players with Fort and AB, heal people who get damaged, use Group Invisibility, zip in near the AV to use recovery and regen auras, etc. I summon pets when they go down. I use my three measly ST attacks when I'm not doing anything else. Oh, and I don't rock the Healing Aura.

I play a lot of characters with pseudopets (Earth/Storm controller, Earth/Fire dom, Fire/Dark corruptor, TA/Archery defender), and these results are typical. So I'm not sure pseudopets are really the issue.

One thing I do make a point of is getting into the action fast: if you dawdle getting to the next spawn someone will use Judgement and nuke all the minions. I try to make sure that I debuff the spawn in some way before the heavy hitters take them out. I have no way of knowing whether that makes a difference for the rewards

Sounds like they changed the parser to check for substrings, rather than full words.

Trademark law is rather restrictive -- you can't trademark a basic concept or a core word: you have to trademark one specific word with one specific unique spelling. That's why many companies use weird spellings for their trademarks: that makes it a lot easier to ensure their trademark will hold up.

As with old age, taxes and democracy, the alternatives to lawyers are worse.

This may be due to the way people run the BAF on your server.

Much of the iXP comes from the ambush spawns. If you pull Siege and Nightstar to the area near the helipad where the adds spawn, your controllers/dominators can lock them down immediately and your AoE damage dealers from all teams can take them out.

That will ensure an equitable distribution of iXP.

You can craft the Power Analyzer Mk III recipe to get the equivalent temporary power.